23andme

Category archives for 23andme

John Hawks riffs on the themes of a recent Economist article on personal genomics (which I’ve also talked about here). Hawks argues that “nobody’s quite figured out how to sell sequence to people” – that although 23andMe’s marketing strategy is shrewd, it’s still “marketing based on anxiety”, and the provided content initially didn’t seem that appealing:…

Attila Csordas has a post up at Partial Immortalization explaining how to use the application MitoWheel (which Csordas helped develop) to visualise data from the new Haplogroup Tree Mutation Mapper from 23andMe. This might be a fun way for genetic genealogy afficianados to spend a few minutes getting to know their genomes better. This reminded…

Personalised medicine pioneers Helix Health have announced their intention to seize control of the assets of personal genomics company 23andMe. Helix Health founder Steve Murphy (left) laid out his takeover plans during a press conference this morning. “It’s time to seize the moral high ground!!!!” he proclaimed, physically spelling out the additional exclamation marks to…

Personal genomics company 23andMe has just launched an online community of “mommy bloggers” – a move I can only describe as sheer marketing genius. I’ll give you a moment to let the vision sink in. Imagine a group of women hungry for information about the best way to ensure the future health and wellbeing of…

To complete my 23andMe trifecta this morning, here’s Steve Murphy frothing at the mouth about the company’s recent antics: Why is it so vital that physicians, nurses and others in the healthcare field try to stay above the law? Because patients lose trust in the system. They begin to think that their care givers are…

This casual aside on a recent post on personal genomics company 23andMe’s corporate blog caught my eye: Mutations in several other genes have also been associated with Parkinson’s disease, but these are extremely rare. Many have been found only in one or two families. While these mutations are so rare that they are not covered…

Drew Yates at ThinkGene has a delightfully cynical take on the personal genomics industry: I know 23andMe’s game, it’s the “break the mean with variance” game, and it’s the same Silicon Valley game that’s been played by internet media companies for the last decade. How to play: a network of superior talent and funding backs…

Over at the 23andMe blog The Spittoon, company co-founder Linda Avey expands on her vision for a novel model of genomic research, in which personal genomics customers contribute their genetic and health data to fuel research into the inherited and environmental triggers for disease. This is a model that 23andMe has been building towards for…

Genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger explores the results of his ancestry testing from 23andMe, and compares it to previous results from a much lower-resolution test. The main message: the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers used by 23andMe (and other personal genomics companies, e.g. deCODEme) to infer genetic ancestry provide a much more detailed and accurate…

I received an email a while back from a reader wondering why his friend has had to submit multiple saliva samples to personal genomics company 23andMe without getting a result back. Customers in a similar position may be reassured by a lengthy explanation posted yesterday on 23andMe’s blog about their sample processing protocol, penned by…